“Does he know we’re watching him?” she asked now.
“Not unless the camera isn’t hidden as well as it should be,” Engersol replied. “Knowing he was being watched would be too distracting, and would skew the results of the test.”
“But it seems — I don’t know, it seems sort of wrong to be watching him without him knowing it.”
Engersol shook his head. “Not really. Part of what I need to know is how he goes about the testing procedure. If he knows he’s being watched, he’ll unconsciously do whatever he thinks I might expect of him. For instance, look what he’s doing now. And keep in mind I told him he was free to go about the tests any way he wants.”
As Brenda watched, Josh flipped quickly through the thick booklet that contained the test, then frowned and started over again. But on the second run-through he paused here and there, then quickly marked a spot on the answer sheet.
“What’s he doing?” Brenda asked.
“What I’ve done is structured the test differently from most such things. There are no separate sections to it — everything’s mixed up together. There might be a problem in algebra, immediately followed by an analogy, or one of the aptitude identifiers.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.” Brenda sighed, wondering, not for the first time, where Josh’s brilliance had come from. Certainly not from herself, she reflected ruefully. Despite Engersol’s efforts to make everything he’d said clearly understandable, she’d still had to struggle to keep from getting lost every now and then.
“I’m not only interested in how well he does on the test, but how he goes about working on it,” Engersol went on. “The whole concept of the function of intelligence fascinates me. Some of the children, for instance, seem to concentrate only on certain areas of the test, mathematics, of course, being the most popular. In fact, I suspect what Josh is doing right now is going through the math problems, solving them as fast as he can, getting the easy part out of the way first. Often, however, the brightest of the children start with the hardest problems, getting the worst of the work out of the way while they’re still fresh. You never know until you score it, but I can tell a lot simply by watching them work.” He nodded toward the monitor, where Josh had abruptly stopped, frowned uncertainly, then flipped back to the third page. A moment later he went all the way to the back of the book and began paging quickly toward the front, his eyes scanning the problems so fast, Brenda could hardly believe he was actually reading them.
“He’s not,” Engersol replied when she voiced her question. “He’s discovered one of the tricks, and I think he’s checking himself out.”
“Tricks?” Brenda asked.
“There are a lot of duplicate problems. Let’s see what he does next.”
In the room where he was working, Josh’s mind was racing. So far, the test had been pretty easy. He’d glanced through the whole thing, and immediately realized that if he were going to get through it in the required time, he’d have to work fast.
He’d started with the math, where he didn’t really have to think. All he had to do was look at the numbers, and the answers were pretty clear, especially since all he really needed was a pretty good guess. After all, who would really think the cube root of 27 could be 9? On a lot of the problems he’d simply been able to eliminate the wrong answers and mark the right one.
But there were so many of them …
And then an idea came to him. He was going at it the wrong way. He didn’t have to solve all the problems. If he got the hardest ones right, it would be obvious he knew the answers to the easiest ones.
He flipped through the booklet once again, searching for something he couldn’t solve at all.
He gazed at an advanced calculus equation, and his heart sank. He didn’t know anything about calculus at all.
Feeling the first twinge of doubt since he’d begun the test, he kept going through the book, searching for questions that challenged his math, but that he at least knew how to work out.
And then he noticed that he was repeating a problem he’d already solved. He flipped forward, finding the same problem on the next to the last page. Frowning, he leafed through the book once again, quickly spotting more duplicate problems. He thought for a moment. Should he find all the duplicates, and make sure he put down the same answers on each of them?
But that was stupid. Once he’d gotten a right answer, why even bother to repeat it? He decided to ignore the duplicates, just leaving them blank.
He went back to work, solving one problem after another until he’d gotten down to the point where he didn’t have to think about them at all, then abandoned the math questions, skipping over them as if he didn’t even see them.
He went to work on the analogies, searching immediately for the most obscure problems and the words he couldn’t define.
While he puzzled out the analogies with part of his mind, he simultaneously leafed through thetest book, picking out his purely subjective choices in the aptitude questions, which were mixed in with the objective questions that dealt with his knowledge and ability to reason. Soon a rhythm developed and he was flying through the book, part of his mind processing the more difficult problems while the rest of his concentration focused on the questions that had no right answers, but were designed to build a profile of his talents and interests.
His confidence grew as his involvement in the test deepened.
He was going to ace the test, like he’d aced all the other tests he’d ever taken.
In Engersol’s office Brenda stared at the screen in puzzlement. “I don’t get it,” she murmured. “What’s he doing?”
George Engersol made no answer, for he, too, was staring at the monitor, his gaze seeming almost to bore right into the image on the screen. Josh MacCallum was working in a way he’d never seen before — he appeared to be flipping the pages almost randomly, as if he weren’t even bothering to read the questions anymore, but simply picking an answer at random from the multiple choices.
Had he given up?
But if he had, and was just marking answers at random, why was he even using the test book anymore? Why wasn’t he simply going through the answer sheets, marking numbers?
A bell sounded in both Engersol’s office and the adjoining room.
Josh, his thoughts interrupted by the sudden noise, looked up at the clock and was surprised to see that the allotted three hours had passed.
His eyes shifted to the sheets on which he’d marked his answers, and he felt a vague queasiness in his stomach.
At least a quarter of the questions weren’t marked at all. And how many of the ones he’d answered were wrong?
But it wasn’t possible — he’d never failed to complete a test before, not even the ones they’d said no one was supposed to finish. He’d always done them all, finishing with plenty of time left over.
And now he’d failed.
He wasn’t going to get into the Academy at all!
A wave of frustration crashed in on him, and he picked up the pencils that were arranged neatly on the table in front of him and hurled them across the room. Then, snatching up the test booklet, he burst through the door to Dr. Engersol’s office.
“There wasn’t enough time!” he yelled, his face red, his eyes screwed into tiny slits. “Nobody could finish your stupid test!” Flinging the book at Dr. Engersol, he stormed out of the office, slamming the door behind him. Feeling her own face turning crimson with embarrassment, Brenda leapt to her feet and started after him.